Great Balls Of Fire At The Red Rock Diner
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
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| Red Robinson & behind, Elvis by LeRoy Neiman |
Red Rock Diner, billed as a 50’s Rock ‘n’
Roll Revue (created by Dean Regan and based on the early days of deejay Red
Robinson) shook me up with great balls of fire’s worth of nostalgia. My
Rosemary and I went tonight to the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production on
the Granville Island Stage with direction and choreography by Valerie Easton.
I have written before how as an
Argentine-born Latin I never understood or liked musicals. That, all changed
after a few years of seeing musicals at the three Arts Club Theatre stages. And of course I have been in love with Sara-Jeanne Hosie since.
Red Rock Diner is not quite a musical as
the story and the dialogue are sparse. Neil Minor playing Red Robinson gets to
do most of the talking as the deejay.
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| Carl Perkins, left & Del Shannon, right I've forgotten the folks in the middle. |
It took some time before I was over the shock that indeed this was a musical review of many of the most popular rock ‘n’ roll tunes of the middle to late 50s. Once over the shock the memories began to blast my brain.
Consider that since I moved up to Vancouver from Mexico City with my wife and
two daughters in 1975 none of the memories could have involved Red Robinson or Elvis at
Empire Stadium.
My memories came from the fact that in 1957
until 1962 I was attending a Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas.
There was only one radio station KTBC–Radio and one single TV station KTBC–TV.
Both were owned by L.B.J.
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| Paul Anka & friend |
I believe that on Saturday evenings we would watch Hit Parade (sponsored by Hit Parade Cigarettes) in our dorm TV. I remember that it was late enough that we watched it from our beds and that the TV was placed high so we could all see. We hated the program because you did not get to see the original performers of the songs. The imitations were totally lame and some made us laugh.
I can safely assert that all the songs
performed tonight were done beautifully. Colin Sheen’s (Johnny B) falsetto was
a dead-on Del Shannon and Zachary Stevenson’s (Val) was a perfect and a not
over-the-top Elvis.
The band, Mathew Baker, bass, Todd Biffard,
drums, Steven Greenfield, keyboard, Jeff Gladstone, guitar, and Brett Ziegler, saxophone,
is first class, while Zachary Stevenson did wonders himself with that sax and a
guitar. In short in this musical review, the singers can dance, the musicians
can sing, and many of those singers can play the yo-yo (Colin Sheen) or
skillfully manage hula-hoops, Robyn Wallis (Venus), Anna Kuman (Connie) and
Tafari Anthony (Richard, and a great impersonator of Jerry Lee Lewis). Kuman managed the hula-hoop with her ankles, super
fast and Anthony with his neck. I must add that Zachary Stevenson on a pogo
stick never did fall, even once.
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| Valerie Easton, left & friend |
This reminds me that in the Arts Club
Theatre’s presentation of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, one of the
actresses had to master the musical saw while in another play Jennifer Lines
pulled out an accordion from under a sofa and managed just fine.
My boarding school experience in Texas was mostly a
melancholy one as I never did learn to dance. If you didn’t dance you were
shunned by the Catholic girls from St. Mary’s across town. I did sort of manage
to get enough nerve to ask my heartthrob Judy Reyes(She never knew. As she was a cheerleader she would have never noticed me.) to dance in our basketball gym sock hops.
Sock hops because neither Brother Hubert nor
I, who took care of that varnished floor would have ever allowed leather-soled
shoes on it. I shuffled the slow songs like Theme From A Summer Place (performed by Percy
Faith and most certainly not a rock ‘n’ roll song).
I did manage to go to a hamburger joint on “the drag” near the University of Texas with my friend Lee Lytton who owned a 56 Chevy convertible (kept it hidden as we could not have cars as boarders) and we were served by bobby-socked waitresses on roller skates.
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| Judy Reyes |
I did manage to go to a hamburger joint on “the drag” near the University of Texas with my friend Lee Lytton who owned a 56 Chevy convertible (kept it hidden as we could not have cars as boarders) and we were served by bobby-socked waitresses on roller skates.
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| Wolfman Jack & Del Shannon |
That whole Texas experience was a nostalgia I would not understand until I started taking stills at variety shows at the CBC in the late 70s. It was then that I met and photographed Wolfman Jack on his show, the Paul Anka Show and others so got to photograph Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Del Shannon and many more. But such was my ignorance on all things "rock" that the CBC
cameramen had to patiently explain to me who these luminaries were.
Of Paul Anka I must complain that I had to
suffer months of hearing him sing in almost every show date New
York-New York,
My Way and worst of all Diana.
It was in the 10th grade that
one of my roommates was infatuated with a girl from his hometown, Odessa who was called
Diana. It was Paul Anka’s Diana all day and all night. I cringed until the
young man was sent home because he was caught leaving the snazzy gentleman’s
apparel, Reynolds-Penland on 8th and Congress Avenue wearing three pairs of slacks.
The first act of Red Rock Diner happens in
the diner itself and with an upper balcony for the Dee-jay Red. It was the
second half, the prom at King
Edward High
School that made me slide into melancholy. I
could even imagine the smell of the treated sawdust I used to push on the floor
of my St. Ed’s High School gym.
The melancholy was partly because I must have lived in complete naïveté. We knew that marijuana was bad because we had seen photographs of actor Robert Mitchum sweeping a jail corridor. “And look how his eyes are semi closed. That’s what marijuana does for you.” In my naïveté I did not know about heroin. We avoided 6th Street as we were told we could be rolled by spicks, The spicks in our school were all well-behaved Catholics as was Richard Mosby our token black classmate. Everything was in its place, or so it seemed to me. In the periphery of all this we heard of a strange magical substance called Spanish Fly.
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| Jackie Coleman, Paul Williams & Valerie Easton |
The melancholy was partly because I must have lived in complete naïveté. We knew that marijuana was bad because we had seen photographs of actor Robert Mitchum sweeping a jail corridor. “And look how his eyes are semi closed. That’s what marijuana does for you.” In my naïveté I did not know about heroin. We avoided 6th Street as we were told we could be rolled by spicks, The spicks in our school were all well-behaved Catholics as was Richard Mosby our token black classmate. Everything was in its place, or so it seemed to me. In the periphery of all this we heard of a strange magical substance called Spanish Fly.
Red Rock Diner somehow kept my naïve memory
of the 50s alive. There was a token (wonderful singer and not to mention his
hula-hoop extravaganza) black man in Tafari Anthony, the duck cuts were slick
but clean and the women attractive and almost wholesome.
I would have easily returned home in the glow of a rosy and uncomplicated past. Everything in its place. Except somehow I was exhilarated in a way I would not have been back in 1957. Costume Designer Darryl Milot in Robyn Wallis’s (Venus) polka-dot top (nice plunging neckline) evoked Marilyn Monroe’s dress in The Misfits. The blonde hair and some of Wallis’s singing was pretty good Marilyn too.
And the King Edward
High School prom dress
that Milot designed (sparkling blue also with décolletage) for Wallis made me
almost want to go on stage to see if I just might catch a slow dance. But I
didn’t dare.
I do not think that the pictures of a very young Valerie Easton (the Director/Choreographer) who was one of the jazz dancers for the late 70s CBC variety shows will in any way embarrass her!
Below are a couple of scans from my 1957 yearbook. I did not attend the prom. I did not have Dee-jay Red Robinson to assuage my loneliness with his radio program.
I do not think that the pictures of a very young Valerie Easton (the Director/Choreographer) who was one of the jazz dancers for the late 70s CBC variety shows will in any way embarrass her!
Below are a couple of scans from my 1957 yearbook. I did not attend the prom. I did not have Dee-jay Red Robinson to assuage my loneliness with his radio program.
